We recently wrote about Ruslan Khasanov‘s sublime typeface, Au Revoir, which he made by painting letterforms onto a porcelain sink with the spigot on and photographing them before they slipped down the drain. Now, the Russian designer has produced animated GIFs showing some of the letters evaporating like smoke into thin air.

“I was especially impressed how the ink spots was dancing exposed to water, a bizarre dance of life, between birth and death,” Khasanov tells Co.Design. To achieve the desired effect, the designer took more than 5,000 shots, tons of which were deleted in the editing process. “Many letters I painted over and over again to get the most interesting plasticity, texture, and dynamics,” he says. Whereas the Au Revoir letterforms merely hint at their ephemeral nature, the animated GIFs show the entire birth-death cycle, which the designer sums up with the phrase “I’ve gone away.”